Saturday, February 17, 2018

COMING SOON IN TERRIBLE MAINSTREAM PUNDITRY ON RUSSIA

Robert Mueller's indictment describes quite a plot: Russians making reconnaissance trips to America to refine their understanding of our political system and the ways it's vulnerable to propaganda, the use of fake identities and stolen Social Security numbers, the elevation of every candidate who threatened Hillary Clinton -- Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Jill Stein -- and the online denigration of all of Trump's enemies, the use of fake offline political theater, like the scheme to construct a mock-jail meant to house a fake Hillary Clinton for an event in Florida....

Obviously, we have two problems: We need to determine how much involvement the Trump campaign had with this plot and we need to prevent the Russians from doing this again and succeeding. For now, punditry outside the right-wing media swamp generally acknowledges all this. But terrible mainstream takes are coming, so get ready.

I'm predicting that soon we'll be told by at least one mainstream pundit that the lack of action on the part of the White House should be blamed on Democrats and liberals -- our determination to find Trump administration crimes is making the White House dig in its heels and refuse to act on Russian election sabotage. Because we keep trying to portray Trump as an illegitimate, criminal president, he won't do the right thing. If we'd just stop, he'd be more likely to acknowledge that there's a threat to America and take action. So, really, the lack of action is all our fault!

How soon will we see this take on -- just a hunch -- the New York Times op-ed page? I give it a week, tops.